Community Economic Development as Permacultural Design

Community Economic Development as Permacultural Design
Gerald Oliver Dillenbeck, MPA, M. Div., PDCertified

1. Community Development Question: Are we optimizing sustainable health and economic development outcomes with and for, emerging from, the full diversity of our community?
2. Problem: How do we cultivate development strategies demonstrating self-regenerative community improvement standards? What are our Optimal Continuous Quality Improvement (OCQI) policies and procedures, our professional principles of inclusion, choice-making, and implementation planning? Are we appropriately networked and cooperatively prioritizing to deal with shared global issues like climate change and international challenges of degraded water, soil, and atmosphere?
3. Proposed Solution: Natural systems design and development paradigms, such as Buckminster Fuller's Synergetics, Deep Ecology, and Permaculture Design, may share a strategic optimization principle of dynamically balancing positive and negative functions, called the Trim Tab effect, by Fuller, the "tipping point" flow/functional change threshold in systems theory and design, the wu-wei discernment principle of Taoism, to produce self-correcting and regenerative feedback loops, stable and resilient polycultural "climax" systems, and perhaps even Dr. M. L. King's "Beloved" communities.

Strategic Questions about Post-Millennial Community Development
An inclusive global mission to reverse climate warming by promoting Earth Justice surfaces high priority economic and ecological issues. Coincidentally, growing friction, between corporations with deep economic pockets and communities without sufficient natural resources for development, boils and brews like wild yeast. A post-millennial natural system reform and Earth protection movement spreads through Eastern and Western religious sectors, ecological-economic cooperative networks, and justice advocates of every "special interest" stripe. Is engorging fascination with regenerative systems and concomitant economic trend analysis an evolutionary virus, perhaps fuelled by a spreading cooperative information network as accessible as a cell phone or laptop? Are ecological, economic, climate, social, racial, and gender justice constituencies acting less specialized and more interdependently mobilized for something that might be called Earth Justice?
Where might Community Developers ride on an Earth Justice bus? How many of us have already assigned ourselves an urgent seat for this journey? Do community developers and organizers wrestle with a critical, tipping point question: Has the time for Business As Usual-Means-Marginalized-Lives-Do-Not-Matter approaches to social and economic systems development become too short? How might we effectively facilitate an economic system reversal away from dominant win-lose, capital-monopolized, value exchanges? Are we inevitably headed for collective and climatic bankruptcy rather than the Climax Community goal of permaculture design?
Permacultural Ethology as Normative Systemic Praxis, or
Paradise Polycultures, Yes! Monopolistic Monocultures Not-So-Much, Please!

My training in public administration and community development lead to organizing affordable housing cooperatives, building multi-sector alliances for regional ecological policies and procedures, and concluded with grant and contract resourcing for those left on the lower margin of our increasingly stratified culture. A practice of listening at "street level," especially to younger adults and adolescents, has circled back toward rediscovering a desire to challenge my own assumptions about ethically acceptable behavior of our political, social, and economic systems. While working on Permaculture Design certification, I began looking back at my community economic development story as a small portion of our collective "development" evolution. This metasystemic and polymorphic cooperative venture intends to grow a rich and deeply regenerative economic network.
Polycultural economic outcomes are multisystemic and evolve from permacultural plans, like developing a diversely fertile organic farm, harvesting and redistributing resources with zero-waste remainder. Polycultures develop self-regenerative patterns of resilience through diversified root-system networks. They share a negative correlation with monocultures, which reside on the more monochromatic, monopolistic, monomial, less sustainable and inclusive, end of an eco-culturally bilateral spectrum. Optimally functioning polycultures are organically integrated, multi-systemically harmonious, diversely inclusive, ergodically self-perpetuating synergetic environments; a superlative perennial garden is also a polypathically integrated teleological paradigm, a well-designed 0-sum balancing multi-functional property, or person, or Climax Community, or "Beloved" cooperative economy. While monocultures develop in-bred, over-crowded, hoarding, and internally competitive "weedpatch" domination patterns, polycultures have rich interdependent functional depth and regenerative potential, balancing producing and consuming symbiosis.
Permaculture has agrarian roots, deriving from "permanent agriculture" (Mollison and Holmgren, 1979), but is post-millennially evolving into an eco-systemic agenda to regenerate stable polymorphic systems co-identifying our Exterior Landscape, what Fuller calls our physical universe of functional relationships, with our Interior Landscape of metaphysical economic logic and logistics; a deep ecology research mission to uncover systemic pattern and potentially significant development information camouflaged within noise, chaos, and cognitive/affective dissonance.
How, what, why, when and where we communicate, transact, relate, consume and produce, and otherwise invest co-operative time, is our permacultural praxis. Nutritional well-being outcomes reach for optimally sustainable Climax Community resolutions for sustaining life by developing cooperative, integrative, and self-regenerative economic performance, democratic principles of reverse-hierarchical subsidiarity, and profoundly inclusive solidarity within Earth Rights for deriving choices, policies, procedures, and intervention strategies. When mutually-cooperative economic practice mutually defines (double-binds) ecological system optimization intent, permaculturists produce synergetic outcomes approaching polycultural climax. The proof of OCQI standard performance is in the polycultural pudding's perennial outcomes.
Ethical norms for community and economic development overlap justice advocacy, evolve, resolve integral solidarity resonance through seasoned experience designing inclusive, symbiotic, dense, resilient, "deep value" Climax Community cooperative economies. Climax Community constituents collaterally articulate, mature and interdependently diversify, as they diastolically flow away from negative dipolar descriptors:
Monocultures, not polyculturing populations, trend toward monopolistic over-population and cannibalistic collapse.
Dominant monocultures grow increasingly rabid monochromatic behaviors; they over-specialize, and destroy species diversity, including interconnected functional-nutrient diversity.
Monocultural self-apprehension evokes "autistic" Closed System entropy and stasis; "we are slipping, failing, cramped, crowded, in climatic systems decay."
Monocultural aggressive spread of a dominant species will approach an economic tipping point threshold, expanding marginalization borders and systemic sub-optimization across other wilting and disappearing species, subcultures, and indigenous outlier resources. Healthy diversity evaporates; extinguishing resources decrease in nutritional diversity and value.
Permaculture Design intends to reverse dominant monocultural losses and waste, to optimize polycultural community and cooperative economic development. This increases diversity and sustainability of yield while reducing risk in any one investment. OCQI design standards for measuring outcomes analyze both positive and negative deviant trend analysis. In other words, as monocultural negative trends decrease, polycultural integrity and balance of economic and community nutrients and resources will "open" the ecosystem to newly potentiated positive co-operative trends, deviating from, "tipping," prior dominant monoculturalist trajectories.
A permacultural frame for community development implies that we are a species of polysystemic-functional/dysfunctional developers, applying tipping point strategies to cultural and economic dissonance issues. We actively anticipate positive deviant places, people, spaces, critical-event urgencies, noting systemic balancing trends between positive values (e.g. cooperative vocations and homes and families) and negative aversive disvalues (e.g. dominating-competitive win-lose survival strategies, negative campaigning, monoculturalism, and "Closed System" atmospheres/attitudes). Permacultural development and design mentors receive and decompose negative feedback, for tipping-point correction, as adroitly as regenerating positive outcomes, for multisystemic therapeutic reiteration.
Permacultural developers cooperatively and inclusively notice/apprehend, question, explore, comprehend, and then regenerate sustainably balanced economic outcomes, uncovering and embracing win-win strategic design choices. For example, rather than designing a top-down power hierarchy, creating scarcity and competition for economic, social, political, and overall well-being rewards, ecological economists invest in worker-owned cooperative models that support friendly indigenous "challenge" competitions between recycling/rehabilitating teams, to yield greatest repurposing effectiveness with least loss into land fills, homeless shelters, and rehab centers.
Permacultural Economic and Community Development
A permaculturist's community development project is an incarnating work in progress. The cooperative mission is to inclusively regenerate people, places, and planet. A permaculturist's vocational purpose is to optimize natural systemic improvement for Self, Other, and Earth Care by hosting space for therapeutic orthopraxis. Leading with Buckminster Fuller's Synergetics, folding in Permaculture Design principles and procedures, seasoning with some Open Systems Theory, compiling Positive, Integral, Feminist, and Compassion Social-Psychology, then incubating in a solar systemic oven, we hope to live in early stages of a more cooperatively effective, and inclusive, economic network.
Vision Statement
Permaculture Development Projects cooperatively design, live, and sustain a Climax Community multisystemic polyculture.
Each individual cooperative member self-identifies as a potentially thriving permacultural practitioner.
Each cooperative community and enterprise adapts, evolves, and resolves Optimal Continuous Quality Improvement (OCQI) Permacultural Design and Development standards, policies, procedures and economies, interdependent relationships of solidarity, and self-governing structures of mutually equivalent subsidiarity to sustain Earth's full diversity of life for at least 7 generations.
Permaculture development rises or falls with an alliance of marginalized populations, properties, places and spaces. Indigenous permacultural leadership recognizes opportunity for unusually rich evolution in the sight, sound, and smell of "parasitic weeds" gathering in rehab and 12-step programs, asylums, prisons and deforming schools. Yeasty fermentation, a hibernating metamorphic decomposition stage of development, demonstrates rich potential for full-blown diastasis; opening Occupier spaces for rhetorical articulation, and springing spontaneous evolutions.
Buckminster Fuller predicted post-millennial community economic optimization through ecological cooperation. He did not advocate for cooperative systemic norms and ethics and economics only because he believed this was the kinder, more loving, or more faithful, or even spiritual way to unfold our ecologic—although he apparently did believe those things. He expressed synergetic design principles as innately cooperative Universal Intelligence. Neither intelligence, nor integrative creativity, nor communication could exist at all, much less anything approximating the intricacy of a cell, certainly nothing we would call a community, without intuited/inherited cooperative economic intention and praxis.
From his regenerative teleology observation that metric-system form follows function, Fuller derived his rational ecological conclusion that all living systems are synergetically reformative, regenerative, redemptive, positively, integrally, harmoniously balancing systems by original intent of Universal Intelligence. If not, then life becomes attenuated as dying, overly-competitive monoculturing systems. Entropy awaits as ultimate demise, an incubating place for negentropy to reabsorb synergy.
This sweeping ethical-normative view of universal intelligence reweaves, as syntropy, what science's left-deductive brain calls natural systems, and what right-inductive brain confluently encodes and transmutes as a metaphysical Open Eco-Universal System. Perhaps what was more shamanically understood as tao has become the dynamic content of systems and game theory, the land of mathematic's Group Theory, and now permacultural economic incubation.
While Fuller believed we are all born with creative, regenerative intelligence, he was also concerned that this co-development intuitive system of consciousness quickly becomes depressed in overly competitive, quick-growth dominating economies, like schools and industry and corporate cultures. How holistic Positive Psychology super-stars grow into marginalized skins and neighborhoods hunted by predator, capital-monopolistic economies is our story of contention, dissonance, or, in Eastern traditions, suffering incarnation. Taoism stipulates that nature is unkind, but regeneratively intelligent; except for human nature with all our confusion about economic values and injustices that commodify, isolate, enslave, addict, and extract Earth's elements out of our planetary Commons. If air, water, soil, and solar flames are our progenitor natural systems, then history raises a question of who "owns" what. When fleas claim ownership of their dog, both host and parasites have reached a dangerous tipping point.
A profoundly significant tool introduced to post-millennial community development is our global information network, already experimenting with alternative currencies, exploring ways to organize cooperative information and skills for survival and artistic expression, to facilitate public policy and budgeting choice-making, ways to record value exchanges limited by their deviation from a (0)-sum centric transactional balance. The internet merges consumption and production issues through an increasingly accessible, deep-culturally rooted cooperative, "decomposing" large data-crunching, information system—analogical systemic information translated into polynomial binary information. We grow followers and access to allies and accomplices from within our local silos of economic activity, increasingly on-line, where we usually have a choice of free or fee services; a mixed economic culture of "pay-it-forward" equity contributions to our cultural Commons, and "what cost the public market will bear" investments for capital production. The consumer difference between choosing what a producer has to sell or doing without, on one hand, and capacity to choose what I have to sell or what somebody else is offering for free to anyone willing and able to receive it is the difference between a free market economy and a competitive market economy.
Post-millennial young adults and adolescents often feel culturally alienated by competitive economies of scarcity, and concomitant hoarding of nutrients and wealth, as do more economically and socially marginalized populations of all ages, races, religions, and nationalities. These two population sectors, the young and the otherwise-marginal, grow in hope for commonly-held ecological nutrient values and avoidance of disvalues. Democratizing developmental praxis among at-risk mutual mentors and allies turns toward discernment of which nutrients we choose to water and fertilize within each preferably cooperative moment and day, and which we want to slim and calm down to a more holistically proportional positive function.
Cognitive dissonance protects all of us from noticing inconsistencies between ecological intent, and Business As Usual praxis. However, already wilting populations have more experiential, intuitive, and therefore accessible values for cooperative Commons economic design. Many have been bully-encultured as "parasites" infesting an otherwise benign "Host;" Business As Usual Means You Don't Matter. While we universally hear and feel miserable dissonance about what we should divest of, give up, at-risk community co-redeemers more readily agree that community development, at least theoretically, abstractly, intentionally, is all about investing in each mutually broken, wilting Other, as part of Self-identity; who we are is what we absorb with and from others. This emerges, issues forth, as improved compost for ecological solidarity-building; perhaps the prime-root of rehabilitation and repurposing programs.
Regenerating communities could thrive more holistically within larger scale cooperative economic networks. In destitute neighborhoods of divestment, elitist investment assumptions about risk and value loss are both cause and effect, stimulus and response, in a negatively-trending extractive-addictive divestment feedback loop. Community degeneration is run-away corporate divestment. Cooperative win-win investment strategies include, stimulate, and respond to marginalized people, families, neighborhoods, communities, where Positive Deviants pull together in "Holding Actions," resisting and protesting chronic stress survivalist environments, to sustain life by minimizing catastrophic risks and loss of health, however temporarily. Wilting populations might be more instinctively and nutritionally drawn toward cooperative systems thinking, but usually without the luxury of daily strategic and analytic mentoring support.
Polycultural mentor-developers recognize segregation of impoverished, even dying, and nutritionally undervalued species as intrinsically problematic for our entire ecosystem, a harbinger of imbalanced tyrannical demise. Somehow, somewhere, somebody gets more than needed, becomes over-self-investing, and hoarding, building up what often become predator cell deposits leaving stagnant wastelands of dehydration, needing fertile investment to flow over to the other side of the economic tracks and boundaries. If segregated economic fragility is our problem, then integrating monochromatic wealth forecasts an emergent tipping point toward a more positive polyculturally sustainable outcome for all community sectors.
Further enriching gated and guarded, over-commodified and incorporated, populations of superfluous wealth-addiction adds dissonant stress to economic health. Hundreds of thousands of us already live far above the economic tipping point where having more resources no longer adds to any sense of well-being. What other economic value could be richer, or have deeper pockets? Yet, we occasionally feel defensive, perhaps even threatened, by outraged and screaming wildness, prophets, occupiers, mystics, seers, and messiahs, the occasional community organizer, gone native.
Solar Fueled Economic Systems
Permacultural orthopraxis identifies human mind-nature as indigenous to, and reflective of, Earth's nature. Intelligent design, if unique to our human perspective, has only anthropocentric credentials for self-regenerative potential. No scientist could support this hypothesis. By contrast, Earth's value-exchange economies within and between soil's formation, water and air flow, patterned seasonal and diurnal frequencies, and symbiotic consumer-producer functions, are each secondary to Earth's passive (or pacifist and parasitic, if you prefer) solar fuelled dynamic and magnetic balance. All investment function, nutrition, healthy yield, derives from cooperative host-parasite mutually perpetuating dynamics. Our solar systemic "gift" production of heat, light, and gravitational pull, empowers all awareness of, and relationship with Earth's air, water, and soil systems. Community development takes place within a more primally inclusive solar subsidiary and isotropic regenesis. "Survival of the fittest" tells only the endosymbiotic understory of evolution; thrival of interdependent relationships tells our global ectosymbiotic evolutionary story.
Solar fueled frequency waves of functional energy and information evolved Earth's ribonucleic regenerative development with a cooperative investment win-win default, resulting in our multisystemic, polycultural, renewable economy of RNA/DNA incarnation itself. Polyculturalists search the wisdom to follow suit, designing, developing and administering gardens and farms, residences and vocations, economies designed to incarnate an ecological Commons, functioning with a "stone soup" cooperative orthopraxis. Who we are and wish to develop together is, ultimately, all we have for positive-functional investment and economizing.
Permaculturist developers ask how can our community's economic design regeneratively optimize life? Where do we find Positive Deviant trends within negatively trending neighborhoods and families? How can we mentor and facilitate the further integration of our indigenous nutritional wealth deposits? A permacultural strategic approach to development begins with studying the restrictions and opportunities of Earth's healthy development and climate change. Just as a permaculturalist's job description is to mentor and facilitate Earth's equitable rights and positive opportunities for healthy polycultural development, so too an ecological economy developer's job description is to mentor and facilitate humane equivalently subsidiary rights and optimization opportunities for all species' multisystemic nutritional development. This would seem to open our frame for Community Development to something more like Earth ReGenerative Mentors.
Permacultural Economic Principles
The Permaculture Design literature is thick with candidates for what we might label Economic System OCQI Standards. Community developers and organizers look for ways to facilitate Climax Communities. Bill Mollison, progenitor of the term permaculture, gives five "Attitudinal Principles," five interdependent ways of describing prime economic relationship: diversely optimize positive systemic nutrients by minimizing negative dissonance and loss.
The problem is the solution: All information grows both opportunity and risk of tipping points; we explore problems in our system and seek to solve them from within the dissonant tip-pointing system. What we view as a negative indicator also has a positive aspect that is significant to problem perception, framing of issues, and potential solutions. We might see economic stagnation as not just about too much competitively incorporated power, but also too little personal, corporate, and public sector investment in already proven cooperative models of self-organization, employment, and residential environments.
If the problem is inbred wealth deposits draining vital resources away from full organic function, then we might implement integrative mutual-investment wealth incentives. We might water investment in cooperative living by sharing habitats with and for those most at-risk of failure to thrive. Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin speak eloquently on this topic of profoundly holistic solidarity with economic fragility as spiritual orthopraxis.
Work where it counts: Discover opportunities to intervene in systems with minimal effort to produce maximum effect; look for ways to strategically leverage tipping points. Unmet needs equal work, and work means time, energy and resources—therefore design to meet the needs of our ecosystem and reduce the amount of work we need to do to maintain self-regenerative systems.
We have neighborhoods and ecosystems and species at risk and we have households and neighborhoods and nations and corporations looking for opportunities to prudently invest in preventive, holistic, multisystemic mental and physical health systems. Indigenous cooperation, within oneself, one's household, local community; these are our lowest investment risks, and therefore our highest optimization opportunities.
Everything gardens: Human nature is an intelligent self-conscious part of a dynamic and ever changing ecosystem; we must recognize the part we play in setting systems in motion. Natural systems include food chains within a nutrient-absorptive/regenerating Host web. Healthy gardens are only secondarily concerned with the number of elements in their system and primally concerned with the interdependent connections and functional balance, complementarity, between elements. The economic effectiveness of positive, actively cooperative, relationships dominates the more secondary, but by no means insignificant, work of comparative, win-lose weeding, thinning, winnowing and pruning challenges to optimize and sustain full polycultural yield.
Infinite yield: The yield of any ecological system is theoretically unlimited—except by the limited economic imagination of system designers. Literally, yield means to produce a return for effort or investment; implied redemptive intent. Too often ecological yield is viewed only through a gross quantitative lens, yet nutritional yields are primarily about qualitative net well-being and growth, synergetically functional relationships intentionally and skillfully inclusive of diverse yield potentials.
Work with nature, not against: Ecological succession is a fundamental concept in economics, referring to orderly mutually redemptive exchanges in the structure of cooperative transactions and communications. Mentoring and facilitating tipping-point succession allows a system to reach its OCQI perennial, and perhaps millennial, regenerative potential. Evolutionary economics is nature working ecologically, and polypathic parasitic developers learning from our environment's emergent issues and surprises. Wrestle with nature, human and otherwise; not against nature, human and not, metaphysical and physical.
Resolving Economic Functions
Living economic systems seek pacific harmonious resolution. Permacultural economic orthopraxis is rooted in optimizing the functional equivalent balance of Earth's systems.
Our value-exchange relationships are enthymematically, or pre-judicially, intuitively cooperative dominant. In the absence of mutually informed, and positive exchange intention motivating an event, we would be more likely to call that event theft, robbery, rape, pillaging, terrorism, rabidity, bullying, or sociopathology, rather than the more equi-valently implied trans-action.
Ionic economic functions, also known as biotic components, are:
Consumers: prey; passively absorbed value, function, form;
Producers: predators; aversive to being absorbed; actively absorbing value, function, form;
Decomposers: parasitic subsidiary interactors with equivalent relational values, ionic, ergodic reformative nutrient-potentiating compost function;
Regenerators: All of the above, harmoniously "hosted," or sited, for mutually supplemental, perennially sustainable yields with minimal risk of catastrophic loss of any indigenous species due to buoyant resiliency of densely interdependent root-to-fruit systemic orthopraxis.
When optimally combined, synergetic systemic balance decreases stress, marginalization, disease, and loss trends. We are meeting OCQI community and economic development standards, moving toward that utopian Climax Community; but with a permacultural self-maintenance plan for long-term sustainability of life in this changing complex world.
Empire-building relationships between predators and prey dominate an economy with monocultural, and monopolistic, tendencies. However, more benignly balanced and cooperatively complex relationships between a web of mutual parasites and hosts, consumers and producers, emerges as normative for developing polyculturally sustainable economic trends, while minimizing risk of Positive Deviant loss. Chronic evolution and crisis revolutions resolve toward a healthier ecosystem. Positive Deviant systemic trends emerge from intricately rich and dense mutual-mentor decomposition, winnowing and harvesting of form, function, frequency and flow trends, analysis of production and consumption complementary functions, occasional eruptions within our framed network of value-webbed transactions.
An economy tipping away from sustainable optimizing trends has wealth deposit functional patterns that are irrationally predatory, producing marginalizing parasites often self-identified as over-populating prey. Chronic over-crowding leads to unprovoked aggression, abuse and neglect of young, a spontaneous decrease in childbirth, increases in infant mortality, susceptibility to disease, including various forms of mental/neural illness, apparent memory loss, autistic relational barriers and defenses. Natural systems function decompositionally, but without equivalent regenerative yield when under chronically moderate to highly stressed dissonant conditions. Evolutionary anomalies tend to pop up as internal dissonance stresses the status quo toward a new tipping point of resonance, resolution of imbalance within our ecosystems.
Community and economic life find progressive purpose within resolving, confluent, informational content—just as ecological systems portray meaning within resonant formational contentment. Value confluence and functional balance between biotic components do not cause cognitive or economic dissonance. Buddhists call this wise purpose for life mindfulness. Fuller's Trim Tab principle is about the positively potentiated dynamics of contention. Aware of dissonance within economic performance, a contentious "rudder within a rudder" gently invites our ever-evolving systems away from an off-center trajectory, and toward a still emergent (0)-sum balance. Zero-loss "Climax Community" decomposition unveils deeply integrated, all-inclusive consumption and diastatic re-production functions (i.e., regeneration) with decreasing risk of value and content loss.
There is no static stage of optimization called "contentment" or "utopia" in real-world natural systems and communities. Hence, the sexier term Climax Community. Evolutionary emergence of positive teleological trends might better be thought of as a verb, an active-peace process, of co-passionate contenting, confluencing, not dissonating. Rich communal economic life is about deep ecological learning from contenting and discontenting experience. In this teleological paradigm, content is synonymous to nutritional information, while discontent grows more statically, dissonantly, chaotically, disformational, dysfunctional, when left out of balance.
Comparing synergetic organic paradigms, the unfolding economy of love (Fuller mentioned love as a synonym for the action of synergy) and seasoned integrity, perhaps "beloved" wisdom, becomes analogous with Fuller's fractal unfolding of Universal Intelligence.
Permaculture Positive Affect Learning Seasonal Metaphor
Decompose form/function Attend/Presence Notice/Apprehend Winter/Advent
Consume function Hope? Question/Doubt Spring
Produce form Faith! Understand Summer
Regenerate information Love/Peace… Comprehend Fall/Harvest
Regenerative systemic process follows a redemptive economic cycle, in which we intend to "buy back," reinvest in those outcomes with the best sustained yield-value and least risk of over-investment. Risk aversion itself seems to recommend becoming as cooperatively self-invested as environmental circumstances allow, as a first-tier priority for OCQI yield development. Self-redemptive economies lead to mutually-redemptive economies, lead to self-regenerating Climax Community development, into perpetuity, or permaculturally..
Cooperative Conclusions
Issues continue to emerge on our permacultured pilgrimage toward maturing permacultural developers despite, perhaps even because of, our most cooperative intentions. Optimizing outcomes with least investment, loss, and suffering, begins with winnowing higher risk competitive investments, in favor of investing everything today in who and what we intend to become together yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
Community development continues cooperatively designing economic networks for non-profits and their perhaps equally redemptorist constituencies: people living in rehab shelters, families struggling with mental illness, reconnecting after being torn apart by imprisonment and/or histories of chronic child neglect.
I like this word, redemptorist. This seems an appropriate era for recycling it from the prior millennium when it was sometimes used to refer to indentured servitude. It is an excellent concept for cooperative economists. To redeem is to "buy back self." In a post-millennial perspective, this feels like what we want to do together, to redeem our parasitic anthropocentric selves from climatic changes that threaten not only our own species, but our home, our Earth, and all her natural "pay-it forward" passive-solar fueled systems. As would-be mentor-facilitators of this evolving/resolving co-redemptive intention, our economic project emerges by looking through competitive, eco-illogical pathologies, to discover therapeutic adventures living in profound solidarity with ourselves, each other, and Earth.

When we comprehend regenerate systemic structure,
then we grow regenerative prime development function,
of time and praxis,
of space and sequential proportion,
of polyculturing evolutions,
polypathic revolutions,
devouring monocultures in warm-blooded synergetic redemptions.
Play nice,
we're all in this mess we created together
so we can keep fixing it forever.
This seems to be what happens
while we are planning and developing other things
behind locked doors and closed competing minds.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eisler, R. (2007) Real wealth of nations. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
Fuller, B. (1975) Synergetics: explorations in the geometry of thinking. New York: Macmillan Publishing.
Fuller, B. (1979) Synergetics 2. New York: Macmillan Publishing.
Mollison, B. and Homgren, D. (1979) Permaculture one: a perennial agriculture for human settlements. Tasmania, Australia: Tagari Publications.
Morrow, R (2014) Earth user's guide to teaching permaculture (2nd edition). White River Junction, VT: Permanent Publications.
Thich Nhat Hanh (2013) The art of communicating. New York: Harper Collins Publishers.














e.g. philosophical, teleological, socio-psychological, learning, and governance systems analysis within diverse Taoist, Buddhist, Shamanic, yogic, and other dynamic nature cultures of evolution
Rosemary Morrow (2014, p. 14) describes Climax Communities as "Those plant/animal communities which have reached dynamic structural stability."
Ergodic: "hypothesis of the path of energy; of or relating to a process in which every sequence or sizable sample is equally representative of the whole; involving or relating to the probability that any state will recur; having zero probability that any state will never recur; " (1985, Webster's)
For a fascinating statistical comparative analysis of 100 year economic and environmental outcome projections, please see the Tellus Institute's website, www.tellus.org. The degree to which we globally learn a cooperative orthopraxis v. a continuing national competitive environment becomes a significant survival issue, especially for populations already on the margins of sustainability. For more on Positive Deviance especially as it has been applied to improving health outcomes in challenged communities, please see the excellent work of the Positive Deviance Initiative (www.positivedeviance.org)
Generalizing the word nutrition to encompass positive values resonant with our full diversity of sensory receptors—so nutritious sounds and smells and feelings and sights.
All systems are subject to comprehension, and their mathematical integrity…and trigonometric interfunctioning can be coped with by systematic [eco]logic. (Fuller, 1975, p. 97) The fourness of self and the fourness of otherness = [binomial and bionic] comprehension. (Fuller, 1979, p. 49)

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